Friday, June 3, 2011

Findings in my Stat Project

I conducted a survey trying to gauge why students originally decided to choose Kalamazoo College and how satisfied they currently are with that decision. Certain factors we looked at were the effects that financial aid, sports, and academics had on their decision. Factors we examined regarding overall satisfaction level with the school were the student's preference to attend college closer to home, amount of financial aid received, and number of extracurricular activities.

Our data yielded interesting results that are very revealing about Kalamazoo College. Using regression, I was able to determine whether there were positive correlations between satisfaction level and other factors, and the importance of certain factors that we tested regarding a student's preference in choosing Kalamazoo College.

Our findings clearly indicated to us that students who chose Kalamazoo College for academics or for sports reasons were, on average, highly satisfied with Kalamazoo College whereas those students who chose Kalamazoo College for financial aid reasons were, on average, much less satisfied. Other interesting finds that we discovered was that a student's GPA had no correlation with the student's overall satisfaction level with the school, indicating that GPA was not a determining factor in overall satisfaction with the school. Also, we were able to determine that student's who preferred to attend a school closer to home tended to be far less satisfied with Kalamazoo College than those who had no preference in whether or not they attended a school closer to home, showing us that distance to home is an important factor to some students, but has no effect on others.